2023-09-17 06:30:19
Seeing children on the street in Girona shirts has become, not too many years ago, the daily bread. Not only in Girona, but anywhere in the demarcation. Children talk about Stuani, Tsygankov or Savinho as they used to do about Archibald, Koeman, Stoichkov, Rivaldo or Ronaldinho. It is the conus football context in Girona. With the team operating in Primera, everything invites to be from Girona. And to brag about it. Everything is flowers and violets now in Montilivi, with a game that makes you fall in love and a club that keeps growing. Quique Cárcel, Pablo Machín and Míchel Sánchez, with the support of the City Group behind them, are the architects of the explosion of the current gironamania. The seed of it all, however, was laid fifteen years ago by that team that, led by Raül Agné on the bench, returned Girona to professional football half a century later. Nothing that happens now and has happened would be explained without Migue, Matamala, Dorca, Jose, Xumetra and company. “We will always be able to say that we were the first to start the journey”.
It is Raül Agné, from his family’s hotel in Hostalets de Llers, where he has put down roots and settled. Who would have told him, he is now thirty years old, when in a dark red Renault Clio he drove the 268 kilometers that separate Binèfar from Girona with his brother to sign for the club. At 23 years old and with a suitcase full of excitement, Agné landed in Girona for the first time. I had heard about the club because it had been just a couple of seasons before it had been on the verge of promotion to Segona A in Salamanca. “I came from Zaragoza B. They made me train one day and I played a friendly against Farners. They immediately told me that, if I wanted, I could keep them.’ He said “yes”.
What the young “Raül” – as he was known then – did not know was that that “yes” would change his life and also the history of the club. Agné made a career in the Girona counties. From Girona he would go to Figueres and, after a couple of years, close to home, at Binèfar, he would return to play for Palamós and again for Girona, where an injury would withdraw him. In between, things happen, he met Cristina, “the woman of my life”. “Fate wanted me to stay here.”
Thirty years after his official debut (against Sant Andreu on September 12), Agné is still in Girona, happy in the Empordà, married to Cristina and with three children, Ot, Ona and Arnau. Agné’s first family in Girona, however, were Jordi Melero and Jan Miquel Salavedra, his teammates with whom he shared a flat on Carrer Marquès de Caldes Montbui. “We were a very young and handsome team. Frigola, Jimmy Prat, Doval… We played well, but it was difficult for us to win. In the end, we saved ourselves on the last day against Andorra”, he explains. The following season (1994-95) everything got complicated. And that things could have been very different for him if Girona had opened up to negotiate his transfer to Palamós. “I had a very good year and Palamós, who was in Segona A, came to look for me. I didn’t have an agent. There used to be training rights where clubs could retain players up to the age of 25. I still don’t know exactly what happened, but I couldn’t go there”, he reveals. Agné stayed at Montilivi and, in a training session, before the second day of the League, he broke his tibia and fibula. The season was a disaster in every way. “They spent more than the account and we were many months without payment”. Those non-payments caused the staff to lock themselves in the dressing room and sleep there for a few days in protest. Girona would go down to Tercera.
From here, the young Raül’s adventures would continue in Figueres (1995-98) where he would begin to change his life after meeting his wife. He previously accepted a proposal from Binèfar (1998-00). “It was next to the house, with my family. Then I came back here. And until now”. Palamós (2000-02) claimed him and then he would return to Girona where he would retire (02-03), ten years after arriving there. The football worm, he continued to have it and decided to take the step to the benches. With Agustín Abadía, with whom he coincided at Binèfar and Narcís Julià, Girona’s sporting director, as references, Agné began at Peralada first and then Palamós, a career on the benches that has led him to direct more than 200 games in Segona A between Girona, Recre, Tenerife and Zaragoza. He has also managed Nàstic – he was sacked in the middle of last year – Cadiz, Córdoba and the Chinese Nei Mongol Zhongyou.
Where he has left the biggest mark is, without any doubt, in Montilivi. In 2007, the team had just moved up to Segona B and, under his baton, won the League and beat Barakaldo and Ceuta to return to Segona A fifty years after the last time. “We had a brutal season. We were a group of players and coaches, with Arnau, who wanted to eat the world. Absolute leaders, with an exceptional staff where we all fit in, both personally and professionally,” he says. And that he had to experience another situation of non-payment for many months. “President Josep Gusó played a game of poker and won because he was a wise man. He was sure that the team would go up”, he explains.
Agné took the team up and experienced historic moments in a first season in the LFP that would be scrapped at the end. I would return in 2010 to experience a magical season and another more complicated one.
In total, there have been 145 games on the bench and 46 more as a Girona player. “Is there room for lunch at the same table as Machín and Míchel? History says yes. He, however, takes iron out of it. “From humility, we are part of a small part of the club’s history, yes. Like the Julià brothers, Xavi Agustí, Machín, Míchel… I am clear, of course, that those who will come must be better than those of now. We are not Raül FC or Míchel FC. I don’t believe in that. We are in Girona FC. I never wanted recognition or anything like that. I find that we are valued; not me, but that team. We were an important part of the club at that time, like Pablo later and now Míchel, with capital letters.
After fifteen years in professional football, Agné considers that Girona is “consolidated in the First Division” because “it was consolidated in the Second Division” and now “is capable of going up again if it goes down, as it happened, because it has foundations”. In this sense, he finds that Girona has built “a football company” that is clear “how the pyramid works”, with City “as a dome” and well defined “all the departments. “Thus, everything is closer to going well, even though in football, two and two are never four.” Agné has not been to Montilivi since the first season in Primera (17-18). “Before, I used to watch ten or twelve football matches every weekend. Now I only look at Girona, Real Sociedad or Osasuna. I will come to see Real, more than Barça or Madrid”, he explains. Of Míchel, he considers that “he is intelligent, humble and is doing a great job”. “He is preparing for something important that will come to him in the future”, he predicts.
Thirty years after landing in Girona, Agné now looks at football with a different perspective. “I’m getting older (53 years old). I feel like training, but not packing. I’m in a stand-by phase. I have accepted and enjoyed the work as it is, without wanting to change it. I have accumulated wear and tear, already. Yes, I would not like to retire without training a subsidiary and, thus, end up where I started, with a baby».
agne and the girona. 1 The technician, this week at the Figueres Parc hotel. 2 Agné, in 1993, as a player in Montilivi.
3 In the dressing room, celebrating promotion to 2nd A in 2008. 4 An eleven with Agné (1993-95). 5 In the swimming pool of the hotel in Llers F
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